Our two-week visit to the beaches of Montenegro was, overall, a bust.

The fault was mine. I tried to recreate the one perfect day we had there last year, on a secluded beach accessible only by boat and with crystal-clear water perfect for snorkeling but with amenities like a small cafe, working restrooms and lounge chairs. To do that, we booked a place that was minutes away from the dock closest to that beach in ⊕ Rating for Čanj: thumbs down, one star, would not go again. Čanj, a small and fairly undeveloped town.

The idea was to take the 10-minute boat ride there each day and do nothing but swim, with some rest and book reading in between laps. The reality was that:

• The beach saw a marked decline in quality since last year, owing to — I kid you not — the proprietor of the cafe getting in a fight with the person with rights to put lounge chairs on the beach, resulting in neither being available, no working restrooms, and the surrounding area being littered with used wet wipes and worse (hey, if you gotta go you gotta go).
• Not every member of our large 12-person group was fully on board with spending most of the day on a beach like that, or any beach really, seeing that they weren’t great swimmers.
• The water was absolutely freezing, even in early August, which is on one hand good because rising temperatures in the Mediterranean sea were tied to climate change, but on the other hand you really had to swim to survive and again not everyone was up for that.

And then, 6 days into our 14-day stay, there was a fire. This sent one half of our group back home to Serbia earlier than planned, and my own clan to ⊕ Rating for Ulcinj: thumbs up, five stars, will go again. Ulcinj, which was the furthest away we could have imagined to go and get away from the smoke. We spent 3 days there, and those were in fact the highlight of the trip because Ulcinj and our last-minute apartment booking were both breathtakingly beautiful. Sadly, the small town beach was a sandy muddy mess, and the larger, 12-kilometer long strip of sand was both too far away and reminded us too much of what we could get in our backyard, so we had to find an alternative for the remainder of our stay.

So we ended up at a resort. Not just any resort, but the first ever ⊕ Rating for the Montenegro Radisson: thumb horizontal, 3 stars, would only come in the off-season so unlikely it would ever happen again. Radisson in Montenegro, or rather a 10-ish or so-year-old complex of beautiful stone-encrusted seaside property that got its Radisson license this year. Not exactly the beach — it sat on a piece of rock so the main way to get into the water were ladders — but it was again crystal-clear, only slightly warmer, and with a greater variety of sea life than the one we first had in mind.

The first day was a fairy-tale ending to our trip-to-date. Sadly, we had 5 more days that all but destroyed our initial impression:

• Smoking was encouraged, by the fact that there were ashtrays everywhere and that even the employees would light up during work hours, including while setting up lounge chairs in a just-opened and otherwise completely empty pool.
• On the other hand, wearing UV-protective swimwear was discouraged. We had several requests from the staff for our 6-year-old to take the upper half of his swimsuit off. Our takeaway from this and the above was that the Radisson in Montenegro had a general pro-cancer stance.
• There exists, we were reminded during our recent trip to Valencia, a kind of effortless hospitality that makes you feel welcome and at-home without being either too pushy or too bootlicky. Unfortunately, the resort staff was not familiar with that or any other type of hospitality, being more inclined to either argue or behave like they were my old drinking buddies.

Topping everything off, our return car trip reminded us that Montenegro sorely lacks infrastructure to accommodate the number of people it receives during the summer, which is not helped by summer-time road closures for repairs. This is unfortunate, because Montenegro is a microcosmos of every possible beach you can find, from Thai island-like seclusion to Greek island wilderness to the Wildwood-level expanses of sand, all in a sub-300km stretch of coastline. If and when we ever come back, it will be on a boat.

This past June was my 15th anniversary of being a resident alien in the US, and just yesterday I have completed my longest trip to Europe since my move: eight whole weeks. Here are a few things that I missed during my (working) vacation:

• Being served clean tap water and unlimited supplies of ice by default as soon as I sit down in a restaurant, free of charge and often without even being asked.
• Not being exposed to tobacco smoke anywhere, but particularly while sitting down in a restaurant, coffee shop, pizza place, at the beach, the pool, the doctor’s office, and even the hotel room balcony.
• Air conditioning being present; and when being present actually being used; and when used not being told how bad it was for me, and how unnatural it was to require it.
• Having access to a variety of national cuisines when eating out, and a variety of ingredients from all around the world when cooking at home.
• Air travel being accessible to the majority of the population. Americans bemoan their airports as dumps compared to those in Europe and (especially) Asia, not realizing that the target audiences for the two are completely different. I would much rather live in a country where air travel is so commonplace that airports resemble bus stations more than luxury resorts.

There is more, of course, just not top of mind right now. And I could have written the counter post about things available in Europe and not in the US but for the most part people in Europe do know how well they have it in those regards (better tipping culture, fewer shootings, more walkable neighborhoods, saner size of cars, etc.) and they are happy to rub it in the Americans' faces during online interactions so there is no point in bringing it to anyone’s attention.

✈️ Travel day today, from Serbia to the US of A. From an authoritarian regime in its terminal stages to one that is just starting out.

Regardless, after 7 weeks away and living out of suitcases we can’t wait to go back home.

What I found at this newsstand in Serbia did not give me hope for the future:

• Exhibit A: an Italian Brainrot sticker book.
• Exhibit B: “How to help a child who wants to be an influencer” as a front-page headline in Serbia’s oldest daily. And no, it is not about counseling.

• The downtown has been hollowed out to the point of being unrecognizable. This is in part due to less foot traffic — the middle of July is when people tend to leave Belgrade — but the empty, broken store fronts make it worse. I am sure everyone was at one of many shopping malls, which is sad.
• File this under “things that are different from when I was a student”: hardly any newspaper stand or store open past 10pm. I had to walk quite a few blocks to get a bottle of water. On the other hand, I may be misremembering how close by things were back then.
• In general, it also looked like more of a generic Central European city than I remembered, and a shoddy one at that. I guess that means quality of life for its citizens may be better (though I doubt it) but it is of less interest if you are a tourist in the Balkans. Granted, I may be used to some things you may find interesting not being from the area.
• At dinner, a waiter lectured me on what I did wrong when putting in my order. It has been a while since I experienced this and I do not miss it at all, though I also have two weeks in Montenegro to look forward to so I’d better be prepared.
• On the flip side, the Moskva hotel had superb service and is unlike any hotel you could visit in the US. Sure, there are Hyatts and Hiltons and whatnot in Belgrade now and I am sure they too are better than their American counterparts but I doubt any can match Moskva for the Murder on the Orient Express atmosphere.
• Things overall are not nearly as bad as they were in the 1990s, but one things that is most certainly worse and obviously so is the inequality which must be worse than even in the US. Branko Milanović who is the world’s expert on inequality and Serbian by origin had a few words to say about the topic.
• In support of this, the new Terminal 2 at Nikola Tesla Airport in Belgrade is more Asian than Western. There were perfumes on sale there for more than $500, which you will most certainly not see at Dulles.
• This is after a single night spent there and seeing the place mostly as a tourist.

• Istanbul airport is Asian more than Western, and shows what type of people are expected to travel by plane in Turkey. The more I travel outside the US the more American airports resemble Greyhound bus stations, which, good for the US of A!
• Turkey used to be where you went for shopping at bargain-basement prices. Not any more, at least if your main currency is the dollar. Either the Turkish Lira is overvalued or the USD is undervalued — or why not both? — but nothing in Istanbul felt like a bargain.
• The above doesn’t even take into consideration the differential pricing for museum entry, whereby foreigners pay an order of magnitude higher prices thank someone with a Turkish ID card. This is generally fair and I consider it a “domestic discount” rather than a tourist markup.
• Per my hosts — I am too lazy to verify but do feel free to check — the city doubled in size in the last two decades and stretches across more than a hundred kilometers. The unfortunate souls who live on the Asian side but work on the European (broadly working-class) or vice versa (broadly middle and upper-middle class) both face hours-long commutes even with enviable (for American standards) public transport.
• This rapid increase in population is due in part to quick-and-dirty builds that aren’t necessarily earthquake-proof, and everyone is waiting for the next big one to hit the city and decimate it. Draw your own conclusions on how that may affect the citizen psyche.
• The underground Basilica Cistern should be counted as one of the Wonders of the World, more so than Haiga Sofia which has clearly seen better days. See also Belgrad Forest, about which I learned while visiting the cistern.
• Talismanic shirts.
• We did not have a bad meal, each one in a typical “Turkish” restaurant with meze and some seafood but each with a completely different array of dishes and ingredients. Pursley (sic!) was a revelation.
• The beer was mediocre — though at least one more Western-leaning place had Duvel on the menu — but I liked raki (with a bit of water and plenty of ice) more than I expected considering I am not a fan of anis.
• Surprising number of infants and toddlers out on the street playing past midnight. Napping during the summer heat and using the cooler night air for some outdoor time?
• Serbian language is full of turcisms so I expected to recognize at least some of the written signs, but those were few and far between. Then I realized the words I know as “Turkish” were imported centuries ago thousands of kilometers away from current-day Turkey. Indeed some of them my hosts recognized as what the very old people living in far-away provinces might have once said.
• Four days weren’t nearly enough.

• Spain may be closer to Florida in GDP, but it is a near-perfect match to California in landscape and climate — without the earthquakes and with much more affordable real estate. I am not surprised they have a problem with foreigners buying up properties, but I was surprised not to see even more tourists in Valencia and towns south like Dénia.
• American service industry know-how never quite recovered after covid lockdowns, so it was a pleasant surprise to see it alive and well in Valencia province and the city proper. Even the worst establishment we’ve visited — a newly-opened, somewhat touristy restaurant with an unexperienced server — was better than the median East Coast sit-down place.
• An excellent example of effortless hospitality was the Westin hotel in Mestalla that made us, three sloppy Serbian-Americans (not all of the children came, and I should write more about this strategy of bringing kids over to trips), not feel out-of-place even though most other visitors dressed as and behaved as royalty. We are very familiar with the “you shouldn’t be here” look, and it just wasn’t there.
• This may be too specific, but that Westin also had the best indoor swimming pool out of the many we have used.
• There is no bad place to put a few small tables and chairs and serve cold beer, nuts, olives and a plate of cheese and ham for a few euros each. Or, if you live close to the beach, put up your own folding table and chairs and have a friend & family gathering.
• The above are so widespread because even the “big” apartments are generally small by American standards — yes, I have been looking at real estate listings — so most people want to hang out in “third places”. Every other article from Chris Arnade mentions this so it isn’t a groundbreaking thought, but it’s nice to see it confirmed.
• Speaking of real estate: price per square foot in Valencia is cheaper than in Belgrade which tells me that either Valencia is massively underrated, Belgrade is overrated, or most likely both.
• Bad people sometimes do good things, and Franco did a good one for Valencia by moving the Turia river out of and around the town which 1) saved the city itself from being flooded including just last year and 2) gave it acres and acres of priceless green spaces that are within walking distance to most of the population.
• This was my second time in the area and I plan on coming back at least a few more so yes, I liked it.

The cell phone of my childhood, still in operation. If you are in Serbia and need to leave the Matrix there are quite a few of them around.

Yesterday I learned about talismanic shirts, and now I know what nerds from 500 years ago did for fun and profit.

Flighty does not seem to be as up-to-date traveling internationally as it is on domestic flights. The IST airport departures board had our flight listed as delayed as soon as we got there, yet the app thought everything was fine. Trust no one.